Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Five years after the “100 Mile Diet”, authors Mackinnon and Smith tour us through their top ten local food projects. From the Napa Valley to New York. Winter farming in Michigan. In Canada, Toronto out-pacing Vancouver. Great talk, inspiring ideas for your food security.
“You say things are happening … give me an example. Numerous organizations are doing lots of great work – permaculture, relocalization, etc. This is wonderful, and I’m involved in it. But everything measurable is going the wrong way. So whatever we’re doing is not working. … Unless all this community work is linked with a broader political struggle, we’re not really going to get anywhere.”
Post Carbon Senior Fellow Richard Heinberg talks about his new book (working title ‘The End of Growth’).
The Big Society is associated with localism, cuts in spending and de-regulation as opposed to community-led re-localisation. While we agree with the need to give more power to local government and local communities, how and why that is done is crucial. What we have done in Transition is to create a powerful story, around resilience and localisation, around unleashing the creative genius of communities to respond brilliantly to times of great challenge. At the end of this paper, we set out what such a story for the Big Society might look like.
– No Impact Experiment: A One Week Carbon Cleanse from No-Impact Man
– Peak oil to drive changes in Dunedin NZ (new report NOW ONLINE)
– Bringing Transition to the airport near you
– Bicycle freight: thinking outside the box truck
One of the reasons I came to the Transition movement was that it seemed to me to be the most viable, most broad-based, deepest-thinking “second dimension” approach available. There simply aren’t any other organizations I have found which are Creating New Structures with as considered and informed and panoramic a scope…Joanne gives her take on adapting Transition for the US.
I read Michael Brownlee’s recent piece “The Evolution of Transition in the US”, with a mixture of fascination and a sense of disquiet that increased the deeper I got into the piece. The concept of Transition has been regularly critiqued, a positive process which has helped to shape what it is today. Most critiques run along the lines of “Transition, nice idea, but it isn’t [ … ] enough”. So, for Alex Steffen, Transition isn’t technologically savvy or optimistic enough, for the Trapese Collective it isn’t politically savvy enough, for John Michael Greer it is guilty of “premature triumphalism”, for Ted Trainer it isn’t sufficiently rooted in alternative culture or focused enough, while for others it is too riven with New Age thinking and pseudoscience. Now, according to Brownlee, it is fatally flawed by not having the “Sacred” at the heart of what it does.
“Our governments are incompetent at best, corrupt and greedy at worst, and people now get that. What Karl Rove couldn’t accomplish, Hillary Clinton is driving home.”
In most legal systems, you have a right to freedom of speech or religion, but you don’t have a right to breathe clean air or drink safe water.
– Nassim Taleb looks at what will break, and what won’t
– Tea Party & Cars
– Post Carbon Politics, Intro
– Slow Money: Reconnecting The Economy To Soil, Biodiversity and Food Quality, By Woody Tasch
– UK economic recovery ‘poses threat to environment’
– Next Generation Democracy: What the Open Source Revolution Means for Power, Politics, and Change
– Cyber-Con (US government and the online revolution)
– The Atlantic: The Shameful Attacks on Julian Assange
In the Q&A section of public presentations we often get asked “How do you tell people about Transition …” Then the questioner launches into a vivid description of how his attempts have failed to get through to his Hummer-driving brother-in-law, or his boss who vacations in the Bahamas, or his fellow churchgoers who rhapsodize over malls and “bargains” at big box stores, or his neighbor with the pristine, overwatered chem-lawn.
